


tipping point

by harlequin87



Category: Rugby Union RPF
Genre: Gen, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-06
Updated: 2021-03-06
Packaged: 2021-03-14 01:41:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,877
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29785257
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/harlequin87/pseuds/harlequin87
Summary: Jonny comes to stay at George's house when he signs from Gloucester. It doesn't go well.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 7





	tipping point

**Author's Note:**

> I made a proper [intro post](https://harlequin87.tumblr.com/post/644917775431811072/tipping-point) (for once) on my Tumblr for this story, and I’d love it if you could check it out!
> 
> CW: George occasionally uses derogatory language when thinking about Jonny’s behaviour, although he is aware that this is not a considerate way of behaving.
> 
> I’ve done a lot of research and spoken to a couple of people about the subject matter, but please let me know if there’s anything you think is disrespectful here or needs more tagging.  
> Overall, this is not an overly cheerful fic, so please bear that in mind when deciding whether to read or not. (The intro post can give some more context to the situation if necessary.)

It doesn’t seem like it’ll be an issue at first, which is why George doesn’t think twice about letting Jonny stay with him while he gets himself sorted in Leicester. He’s not one to turn down direct requests from his head coach, and Jonny’s a good lad. Bit weird, but then George isn’t exactly relaxing to be around either. They get on in England camp, anyway. It should be fine.

*

Things start off well, at the very least. Jonny hops out the taxi with two large suitcases in tow, and George goes from where he’s watching out the window to let him in. He’s determined to be a good host.

“Morning, Fordy,” Jonny says when he opens the door, shifting from foot to foot.

“Alright, mate?” He reaches for one of the suitcase handles, but Jonny tightens his grip in a clear _don’t_ , so he takes his hand back. “Your room’s top of the stairs on the left, if you want to get settled.”

Jonny smiles, nods. “I’ll go and get the lay of the land. No, don’t worry about the cases. I’ll sort them.”

George watches him go up the stairs, dragging the first suitcase behind him. He’s never roomed with Jonny before but he’s heard whispers about his odd habits – odder than the hours of stretching he manages to fit in around training and gym and meetings. They’re good mates, though. It should be fine.

*

When Jonny’s finished sniffing around the house like a cat marking its territory, his stuff safely stowed away to both their satisfaction, they sit down to watch some TV. George doesn’t choose a league match; he’s not going to inflict that on Jonny right away. Instead, he opts for some athletics – Jonny’ll like that, with all his sprinting stuff.

“Can you-” Jonny asks, before cutting himself off.

George looks over. He’s got one hand balled in his lap, the other shoved out of sight somewhere. “What’s up?”

Jonny shakes his head. “Sorry, stupid thing, but could you turn the volume down one?”

He wants to ask why, but that’s not always the best course of action with Jonny. The man once thought he was possessed by a chicken, after all. “Sure.” He clicks the volume down to eleven, and Jonny visibly relaxes.

George puts the remote down, exactly parallel with the edge of the coffee table. If that’s going to be the worst of Jonny’s little habits, he can cope with it. It should be fine.

*

Operative word – _should_.

*

He heads up to bed before Jonny, his new housemate promising he’ll be up in a few minutes. He’s about finished brushing his teeth, spitting down the sink and rinsing his toothbrush, when an odd clicking noise makes itself known.

George steps out onto the landing. The light isn’t on in Jonny’s room, right next to the bathroom, but the lights downstairs seem to be flickering on and off. Either the house is being haunted, or the electrics have developed a weird glitch.

All the bulbs upstairs seem to be working fine, when he checks them, so he goes downstairs to see what’s happening. It’s pretty clear, as soon as he gets into the hall.

“What are you doing?” he asks, irritated. “Mate, I want to go to sleep. Stop messing around.”

Jonny turns round from where he’d been fiddling with the light switches to the hall and the kitchen. He looks guilty; the shuffling is back. “Sorry, George. I was just – yeah.”

“It’s a three-way switch, nothing special,” George says. He just wants to be in bed, winding down before training in the morning. God knows having Jonny here is enough of a disruption to his routine as it is, without him turning all the lights on and off when he should be in bed.

“Yeah, I – sorry,” Jonny says, twisting his hands into the pockets of his hoodie. “I’ll go to bed now.”

George nods, relieved it won’t take more of a confrontation. Jonny isn’t a kid, but he needs to establish the ground rules early. They won’t make it through the month if Jonny persists in doing stupid stuff like this.

He goes back up the stairs, making sure Jonny’s following. He’s already fifteen minutes behind his schedule; he can’t afford to lose more time. “Night, Jon.”

“Night, Fordy,” Jonny says, waving before he ducks into his room. The door swings shut behind him, and George sighs. Crisis averted – for now.

*

He wakes up to the blaring of his alarm, 6:30am on the dot. He groans. Normally, he’d manage a solid eight hours of sleep, setting him up well for training like for the last nine years of his life, come rain or shine.

Last night, though… Even after George had convinced him to come upstairs, Jonny had spent about twenty minutes faffing in the bathroom. Maybe he didn’t know that George’s bedroom was right next to it, but it kept him awake for at least another forty-five minutes.

Losing an hour of sleep once isn’t a big deal, he tells himself, but he’s going to have serious words with Jonny if it happens again.

George drags himself out of bed, opening the curtains to let the August sunrise in while he gets dressed. He can’t hear anything from Jonny – for once! – but it doesn’t strike him as an issue. He’d told Jonny very firmly when they were leaving for training, and there’s still an hour left before they have to go. It should be fine.

It’s once he’s had breakfast, washed up the bowl, wiped down the table, and checked his kitbag in case anything had fallen out in the twelve hours since he’d last scrutinised it, that he realises Jonny isn’t making any noise, _still._

Sue him, he’s only had a housemate for a day. It’s not his fault that he’s forgotten – and Jonny’s a grown man, and older than him. He shouldn’t be his responsibility.

Be that as it may, he’s not willing to be late to training (or not ten minutes early, but it’s the same difference) because Jonny’s being a lazy arse this morning – on his first day, as well.

He knocks on Jonny’s door, counts to ten, and lets himself in. Hopefully, he’ll just have forgotten to set his alarm, not fallen out of bed and concussed himself or something incredibly _Jonny May_ like that.

But Jonny’s not asleep, or lying in a pool of his own blood on the floor. He’s still in bed, staring straight up at the ceiling, and not moving, even to acknowledge George’s presence.

“Jonny?” he tries, waving his hand to get him to blink. “Jonny, you alright?” He’s never heard of Jonny sleeping with his eyes open, or having some sort of paralytic thing, though it wouldn’t surprise him. “Come on, we need to go in five minutes. Get up.”

No response, so George tugs at the covers. He can see that Jonny’s got a shirt on, so he has no reservations about yanking the duvet all the way off if he has to.

Jonny hisses, grabbing the edge of the duvet, and locks eyes with George. “No,” he says hoarsely. “No, I can’t.”

George huffs. “Yes, you can. You’re a big boy, and you know half the lads anyway.”

Jonny shakes his head furiously. “No, you don’t understand. I _can’t_.”

“Why?” He’s trying not to get pissy, but Jonny’s testing him.

“Because – because I can’t,” Jonny repeats. “It’s not _right_ , George. It’s going to go badly. Someone’s going to get injured, I know it.”

George pulls the covers clean off the bed, patience exhausted. “Look, mate, it’s rugby. There’s always a chance. Now, get up and get dressed. We need to go.”

Jonny winces, curling up in a defensive ball before stretching his legs back out. “I can’t. It’s my fault that it’s going to happen.”

“What? Why?” Is Jonny confessing that he’s trying to sabotage the Tigers?

He screws his eyes shut. “Because I didn’t check all the lights last night. I did some, but not all of them. It won’t work. It’s not right.”

“That was what you were doing instead of going to bed?” They don’t have time for this little interrogation, but he also needs to understand what’s going on here.

“Yeah, so I’d know everything would be okay.” Jonny looks at him balefully, rocking a fraction to the left and then the right like he’s trying to calm himself, a baby in a cot. “Please, George, I can’t.”

“I’m sorry, but you’ve got to,” George decides. They’re going to be actually late if Jonny keeps this up. “Come on, get up.” He grabs Jonny’s arm, pulling him to the edge of the bed.

Jonny – no other word for it – _yowls_ , like he’s a wounded animal. “George, no, no, no. I can’t, really.”

George grunts. “Look, you haven’t got a choice – or do you want to be fired before your first week of preseason. Get up; it’s not hard.”

He starts digging through the drawers to find some clothes for him to wear. It doesn’t really matter what, they’ll all be given new stuff today, but Jonny needs to get over himself. “There you go,” he says, turning and chucking the clothes on the bed. “I’ll give you two minutes, and then I’m leaving.”

He wants to sweep out, to drive the point home that he’s not messing around, but his gaze snags on Jonny’s fingers. He’s tapping out a methodical rhythm, eyes closed and face focused, one-two-three-four four-three-two-one against each thumb, like some kind of mantra.

“Hurry up,” George says roughly, then leaves. He has the distinct feeling that he’s got himself more than he’d bargained for here.

*

The annoying thing is, Jonny seems fine once they actually arrive at training. He takes everything in his stride, shaking hands and making introductions gamely. George watches him closely, and he doesn’t even glance at the light switches in any of the rooms. He’s almost starting to believe he dreamt everything that happened before, when he sees Jonny’s left hand, out of sight to everyone but him, moving through the same fluid pattern as before.

He keeps one eye on Jonny for the whole day. The tapping thing doesn’t seem to transfer to the rugby pitch, thank God, but he picks up a few other tics. Jonny flinches away from unexpected contact, and George can’t quite work out if stepping over the lines on the pitch with his right foot first is a deliberate choice or just a coincidence.

(Then again, he knows Rafa Nadal does that, so it could be a neurotic athlete thing. He wouldn’t know, not being one himself.)

Even when George is lined up behind Jonny for a drill, that same one-two-three-four four-three-two-one rhythm is buzzing away in his new teammate’s fingers. It could just be a nervous thing, like Dan Biggar at the last World Cup, but he has a suspicion it’s more than that. Biggar only did those twitches when he was preparing to kick – Jonny’s doing his tapping all the time.

George catches himself mirroring the pattern as he waits for Jonny to finish stretching after training, so they can go home. When he realises, he forcibly grabs his hand and holds it under his arm. He can’t let himself be thrown off by Jonny. One of them has to be normal in the house, after all.

Jonny emerges a good ten minutes later, looking more relaxed than he has all week. “Thanks for waiting, mate. Had to finish stretching properly.”

“No worries,” George says, fighting the urge to look at his watch. He’s sure Jonny said he’d be done at five, and it’s quarter past now. “Good first day?”

He looks over at the winger when he doesn’t answer, to catch him flinching away from one of the doors. “What’s up, mate?”

“Just – the physio,” Jonny says, looking rattled. “Not good memories.”

George hums like he knows what that means – and he does, like every rugby player – but it seems like it’s something more for Jonny. The tapping’s back with both hands now, which must be a bad thing.

“Well, hopefully we won’t be in there too much,” he says, determinedly cheerful.

“Knock on wood,” Jonny answers, strain evident in his voice. He watches George until he does it, feeling ridiculous. There’s superstitions and then there’s superstitions – surely this is going a bit far.

Still, anything to preserve peace in the house, and his own sanity. He has a feeling it’s going to be tested more in the next few weeks.

*

Over the next four days, in the first proper block of preseason training, George comes to realise the true extent of Jonny’s injury aversion. One of the boys goes down with a strained calf a few days in, and Jonny spends the rest of the session staring out over the fields, avoiding the clubhouse at all costs. Whenever he doesn’t have the ball in his hands, he’s tapping away like mad.

It’s really getting his nerves on edge, by the end of the day. George wants to ask Jonny straight out about it, but somehow he knows that isn’t the best way to deal with this situation. So he lets the light-flicking and the tapping and the desperate preference for even numbers on the TV volume continue. It nags at him, modifying his behaviour so much to accommodate Jonny, but the relaxation on his face and the memory of his terror on that first morning keep his mouth firmly shut.

He would talk to Ben about it, but that feels like an invasion of Jonny’s privacy. They’re meant to be housemates, and he’s probably Jonny’s closest friend on the team, and what happens in the house stays in the house.

Besides, Jonny’s almost being a good influence on him, aside from encouraging him to go to bed even earlier so Jonny has time to get his light-flicking out of the way before George actually needs to be asleep. Jonny stretches religiously, he’d known already, but it’s apparently normal for him to eat breakfast while sitting in the splits, and then spend a solid forty minutes stretching before arriving at training and doing more stretching there.

George is never going to be able to do the splits like Jonny – he’s not built for it, thighs thicker than Jonny’s sprinter build – but the stretching works its way into his routine. It’s not until the second week of them living together that he catches himself doing yoga at seven in the morning, like it’s completely normal. Jonny’s been up for half an hour already, fixing some apparent imbalance in his hamstrings. Then again, if it keeps him comfortable, George is all for it.

*

Probably the most annoying thing about living with Jonny is having to give him lifts everywhere. To training, he can understand – it’s better for the environment, and Jonny’s still new to the city. It’s driving him to the shops on a Sunday evening when Jonny discovers they have the wrong type of icetray in the freezer that really frustrates him.

Jonny has a thing about balance, and things being in order. He knows that by now, and he knows better than to interfere with it too much. Having an issue with the dimensions of ice cube used for rehab after a game, though – that’s taking it too far.

“Do you really need it?” he asks, after the third unsuccessful run through a shop. It’s almost nine, and the game finished four hours ago. He just wants to go to bed and watch some league highlights. What’s wrong with respecting his own routine as well as all Jonny’s little quirks?

(Not that they’re particularly _little_ , at this point. If George had to draw his housemate’s habits as a person, next to them, they’d probably be bigger than both of them stood on top of each other. It’s a problem.)

“Yes,” Jonny mutters. “I know what I want. I shouldn’t have left mine at home; they’re right.”

_One-two-three-four four-three-two-one_ go his fingers. George wants to hit something.

“Fine. You can look in one more shop, and then we’re going home. This is getting ridiculous.”

The mulish set of Jonny’s jaw makes him irrationally worried that he’s going to pick a fight. His friend’s not normally like that, but then living together has made them both more antsy, more quick to jump on any irritations. But he doesn’t say anything, just showing George the location of the final shop he wants to try on his phone and staring out of the window.

_One-two-three-four four-three-two-one._

Frustratingly for both of them, the shop doesn’t have the right kind of icetray either. Jonny genuinely looks like he’s about to jump out of his skin if George so much as looks at him funny. George is plain pissed off at this point – this wild goose chase has wasted his entire evening, and all he’s going to get as a result is Jonny spending even longer stretching and flicking the lights on and off.

When they get back to the house, he goes straight to the shower, turning the water on for a good few minutes before getting in himself. That way, he can’t hear whatever Jonny’s doing to calm himself down. It nags at him, a building rage under his skin, and he hopes against hope that the hot water will calm him down. If he snaps at Jonny for his quirks – _which he can’t change_ , he has to remind himself – then there won’t be any coming back for them.

Maybe he should ask Jonny to leave. Almost three weeks have passed since he moved in, so they’ve made it most of the way to the agreed month. Jonny would have to be blind if he hasn’t noticed the way George leaves the room sometimes, goes into the back room and yells into his cupped hands. It can’t be healthy for either of them, trying to repress their natural inclinations like this and only succeeding in annoying the other one more.

George gets out of the shower after fifteen minutes, more scalded than soothed by the boiling water. Jonny must have finished working out his stresses through the lights by now; he’s never taken more than ten minutes on it, at least that George has noticed.

He rubs a few circles into his wrist with the opposite hand, trying to soothe himself. Then the urge comes to him, unbidden, an uninvited flash of an idea.

If it works for Jonny, he might as well try it. Hesitantly, he taps out the familiar, awful rhythm, first finger against the pad of his thumb, then second, third, fourth, and back down again. He runs up and down the scale a few times, then-

He splays his fingers out so none of them touch, staring at his hand like an intruder. He shouldn’t – he _can’t_ be picking up those habits from Jonny. He’ll go mad if he starts doing that himself, spreading the infection to himself, and then who knows where it will lead?

Of course, it’s fine for Jonny to do that, but he’s made the conscious decision to try it himself. He can’t. He shakes his head, shakes his hand like it’ll clear the negative energy from it, and goes to his room to get changed.

Jonny’s sat on the sofa when he comes downstairs, arms neatly folded, feet flat on the floor, and his hands tucked out of sight. George is glad for that – he doesn’t want to be reminded.

“Jon,” he starts, taking a seat at the far end of the other sofa, “I think we need to talk about this – arrangement.”

Jonny nods jerkily. His eyes stare straight ahead, fixed on the opposite wall.

“I don’t think it’s working, for either of us.”

“You’re kicking me out?”

“You have other places to go, and you said the other day your house was ready.” George fights to keep the pleading tone from his voice. “Can you honestly say you’re enjoying living here? We’re friends, but I don’t think we’re meant to be housemates.”

Jonny finally looks at him. From the flexing of the muscles in his forearm, he must be tapping already. George hates himself for causing that kind of distress. “We’ve had good times.”

“And this evening? I’m really sorry, mate, but I’m struggling to cope with it all.”

Jonny looks down at his lap, chews at his lip. If he starts crying, George will probably join in. “Okay. Alright. What are you going to tell people?”

George shrugs. “That we didn’t work well as housemates. They don’t need to know the whole story.”

Jonny smiles, though it’s sad. “Sorry, George. I know I’m a lot to deal with.”

“It’s not you,” he says quickly. Fuck, if there’s one thing he hadn’t wanted to do, it was make Jonny feel like a burden. “I think we just have different – I don’t know, patterns? We both like things a certain way, and they don’t match up. That’s all.”

They sit in silence for a long, uncomfortable minute. “I’ll be out of your hair by Tuesday,” Jonny says finally, standing up to go to bed. “Night, mate.”

“Night, Jonny.” There isn’t much else to say, except – “Do you want to do your, you know, light thing? I’m fine going upstairs for a bit while you do.”

Jonny smiles at him gratefully, tiredly. “Thanks. Sorry, this must be so stupid for you to deal with.”

“Don’t worry,” George says, careful to pat Jonny on both shoulders equally. “It’s not so bad.”

Jonny chuckles darkly, and then George really has to go before he says something stupid. “See you in the morning.”

Lying in bed a few minutes later, listening to Jonny methodically work through all the switches to his satisfaction, George doesn’t know whether to be happy about the outcome of this whole mess or not. It’s a relief for his mental health to know this is going to be ending in the next few days, but he feels bad about kicking Jonny out like this. He’s a good lad, if a little weird, but aren’t they all?

He turns onto his side, burying his face in the sheets. Maybe if he goes to sleep now, he won’t have to lie awake through Jonny’s bathroom rituals too. Then he can wake up and it’ll only be one night more of this awful situation before they’re apart and happy for it.

It’s not a breakup, but it damn near feels like one. He’ll still see Jonny around, though, just in manageable chunks, and that’s what he’d wanted all along. That’s how they operate best. This was a temporary aberration, and all the better for being so short-lived.

The tap turns on in the next room, and he groans into the pillow. Only one more night, and then they’ll have managed three weeks. Three weeks of tapping and turning the lights on and off and generally winding each other up will pass like a bad dream.

He can’t wait.

Before he goes to sleep, though, he makes sure to turn onto his other side. He needs to be balanced, just in case. It feels better. It feels right. It feels – _oh, shit._


End file.
